Seoul Philharmonic ready to make Beijing audiences happy

Chung Myung-whun will lead the Seoul Philharmonic, which stages a concert in Beijing on Saturday.  [Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

Musician Chung Myung-whun jokes that conducting isn't his first job.

"My first job is that of a porter, carrying bags for my wife. Then I'm a cook and then I'm a conductor," he tells China Daily in a recent interview in Beijing.

Chung enjoys making dinner for eight: himself, his wife, their three sons and their respective wives.

In his mind, cooking and conducting have a lot in common. "A conductor should find a good balance among 100 musicians, while cooking is about finding balance between different ingredients and flavors."

Audiences in China can enjoy the music of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, playing under his baton, at Beijing's National Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday.

Sergei Prokofiev's excerpts from Romeo and Juliet and Johannes Brahms' Symphony No 4 will be part of the menu.

Born in Seoul in 1953, Chung was the sixth of seven children from a mother who was determined to teach her kids classical music, even amid the hardships of then-ongoing Korean War.

"I was lucky. ... I listened to music even nine months before I was born as my older brothers and sisters all played music," he told a Chinese TV channel.

At first, Chung became a pianist. Two of his sisters became a violinist and a cellist.

Then the Chung family emigrated to the United States and he went on to study conducting at both the Mannes School and the Juilliard School in New York.

The family opened a small restaurant in Washington DC and that got Chung interested in cooking as well.

"My brothers and sisters helped to serve. I was the only one who enjoyed working in the kitchen," he says.

In 1979, Chung was appointed assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and became associate conductor of the same orchestra two years later.

He says he was crazy about Italian food so he asked the orchestra to send him to Italy in 1979.

In the first year of his stay in Italy, he didn't have a single concert but learned about cuisines and lifestyles of that country.

In the next three decades there, he worked for prestigious orchestras and opera houses such as Teatro Comunale of Florence, Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, Teatro La Fenice and La Scala.

In 2006, he was appointed music director of the Seoul Philharmonic for which he had played the piano once at age 7.

"I do only two things in my life－I play music and I cook. I know nothing else," the maestro says. He says conducting is easy at the first time, anybody can conduct.

"I can teach you to conduct in one minute: the four gestures for four beats. But you become a real conductor only at 60," he says.

To promote Western classical music in Asia, Chung founded the Asia Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997 with South Korean, Japanese and Chinese musicians.

"Now in China, it's like an explosion of music, so many concert halls, so many orchestras and the audience numbers keep rising. As a musician, I'm glad to see this development and I also envy the Chinese people who have so many good music halls."

Chung will also tour with German orchestra Staatskapelle Dresden. The orchestra will visit Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin in November.

If you go

7:30 pm, Saturday. National Center for the Performing Arts, west of Tian'anmen Square, Xicheng district, Beijing. 010-6655-0000.